Jenin massacre or myth?

It is incredible to see your paper not only attempting to propagate the false myth of the “Jenin massacre”, but extending and dramatizing it even further. (‘Make Israel pay bill for its damage, says UN diplomat’, European Voice, 16-22 October).

Are you unaware of what has been common knowledge for more than a year now? The number of Palestinian deaths in Jenin was 52. Around half of those, by the reckoning of the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, were fighters. The others – somewhere between 20 and 30 civilians – were not “massacred”, but died despite the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces to minimize civilian casualties. It is not known how many of these civilians died in houses that were demolished when booby-traps set by the Palestinian militants exploded.

What is known, and has been widely reported, is that there was no massacre. Even that supposed journalistic paragon, the BBC – which had initially thrown all standards to the winds and rushed to publicize the utterly unfounded and unverified claims of a massacre as if they were established truth – had no choice but to later discredit the story.

It is no accident that this story is now mostly referred to as ‘the Jenin myth’. Yet your paper not only insists on warming the story up again, neatly inserting the word “allegedly” before “massacre”, which has the effect of lending credibility, rather than referring, as you should have done, to ‘discredited allegations’.